


Hard to be soft (tough to be tender)

by feyrelay, Kingfisherwoes



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aged-Up Peter Parker, Aging, Bondage and Discipline, Established Relationship, Feral Peter Parker, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Light Angst, M/M, Married Couple, POV Alternating, Sex Pollen, Switching
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-11
Updated: 2019-06-11
Packaged: 2020-04-24 13:30:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19174267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feyrelay/pseuds/feyrelay, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kingfisherwoes/pseuds/Kingfisherwoes
Summary: Peter’s eyes go wide and his eyebrows make a beeline for his hairline. “Uh, Tony?”“It’s not what it looks like,” Tony says immediately, which, yes, he recognizes makes him sound guilty as hell. Peter puts the takeout on the counter and crosses his arms, eyeing the syringe.“Oh,” Peter returns, “... so you’re not about to inject radioactive goop into your veins?”“Well, fuck, Peter. I thought you’d think it was heroin. I don’t know what you know!”(CNTW = consent issues inherent in sex pollen, though the pairing is in an established relationship, if that makes a difference to you, personally.)





	Hard to be soft (tough to be tender)

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has a playlist, [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7dAmXatheXcVSSC03A14cv?si=68KcqgbFS2Wpw9Un0c0akA).

Tony doesn’t like to think of himself as an old man, but his greying hair begs to differ.

He’s long since stopped counting his age; whenever someone asks him how old he is, he tends to simply look at Peter or—if he’s alone—think about how old Peter is and add thirty to get a rough estimate.

It should be disheartening, and it would be if he were any saner. But, as it is, it’s merely _flattering_ , to have a husband half his age.

He knows Peter himself isn’t exactly jazzed about hitting the big three-oh, but Tony is relieved by it, quite frankly.

(Better he should be only twice his husband’s age, rather than two-and-a-half or three times.)

(Not that he’s been doing the math…)

It helps, though, that Peter is so… enthusiastic. Once Tony had stopped with the black-brown hair dye and just let things take their natural course, he estimates that Peter’s desire spiked near-immediately.

It’s nice. That’s love, he supposes.

He certainly doesn’t mind phrases like ‘silver fox’ being thrown around, either. _Lordy,_  he thinks. _As if my ego needed any help._

If only his new look didn’t come with other, more debilitating side effects. Tony doesn’t, for instance, particularly enjoy having to get up to pee three times in a night. It’s mollifying, though, that no matter what hour he comes back to bed, Peter’s natural clinginess and spider senses mean that he reaches out for him.

Frequently, he’ll slip back into bed and Peter—still asleep—will roll over and rub one out against him, as if marking his territory even as he dreams. There are worse things, Tony reasons, than a midnight lapful of sleepy, youthful exuberance.

So, old age = 1, Tony = 0. (Not that he’s keeping score, either…)

And then there are the spider-cycles.

It had started innocently enough. Peter had met several others like him, and not just Miles from Brooklyn, either. There were female spiderlings, too, including Anya and Cindy.

Peter had met Anya at a planned meeting brokered by their mutual friend, that Miles kid, but Cindy had been a complete accident. They’d literally smacked into each other, webs tangling, while chasing a villain.

Together, they’d made short work of the idiot, but the post-patrol high and the excitement of them each meeting a new fellow spider-person had shortly seen them rolling around in the gravel of an abandoned rooftop.

Peter had been horrified with himself and his apparent inability to stop meeting his new friend’s hips and lips in none-to-gentle rocks and crashes. He’d hit his emergency beacon in a panic, even as (to hear Peter tell it), Cindy had flipped them and begun a campaign to get him to cream his multi-million dollar nanotech.

They were best friends, now. ( _Only Peter,_  Tony thinks.)

Tony had enjoyed ribbing his (then, newly married) partner about how Tony had had to pull the pair apart like they were over-excited pups. Dr. Cho had been called in, and they’d found that, in each other’s presence, the spider-DNA could cause two spider-people to start dumping pheromones like it was going out of style.

Banner had confirmed the findings independently, adding that Peter may experience a sort of cyclical arousal if he spent a lot of time around either Anya or Cindy, tied to their more… traditional cycles.

Basically, Peter synced with his gal pals. (Miles had grinned and brought up Gwen. Tony had tried not to laugh too hard.)

The first time Peter’s peak had come around, though. Hoo boy. If Tony hadn’t already been going salt-and-pepper gray, well. Walking into their living room to find his husband panting and trying to do a sort of upside-down and backward handstand to get his own dick into his mouth would have done it, for sure.

He thought Peter was going to break his neck. (Also, all the blood in his body had abandoned post to head south, at once.)

Old age = 1, spider pheromones = 1, Tony = 0.

***

These days, a few years on, things are calmer. Peter has regular bloodwork done, so the peaks and valleys of his spider-cycle don’t surprise anyone. They also do it to make sure they take care of his health as a radioactive freakazoid, rather than just treating the symptoms.

(Radioactive freakazoid lives matter.)

Dr. Cho is happy because she gets plenty of samples, and Tony is happy because he gets plenty of pheromone-driven blowjobs.

It’s a win-win.

But, well, sixty is looming. More and more of the villains that Peter faces, he faces with a team—either the new, young Avengers or the Spider Crew—and Tony, he has bad days. He has days when all he can see is the writing on the wall, until it fills up his vision, until he feels as if he’s one more push away from going full Yellow Wallpaper.

He never thought _he_ was the trophy husband, but there it is.

And what kind of trophy husband is a sixty-year-old?

Time for a spit-shine.

***

It’s relatively simple, really. Tony’s known for ages that Dr. Cho is capable of synthesizing the pheromone and blood samples she gets from Peter on a monthly basis into something more useful.

She and Bruce have done some limited testing on lab rats, and the results have been quite favorable. No organ failure, no deaths. Increased alertness and decreased appetite, it would appear, if the way the rats ignore their pellets in favor of chasing each other around is anything to go by. Some of the rats, especially ones who are in bonded pairs, even saw increased skin and coat health, apparently attributed to a spike in blood circulation and increased thirst leading to better hydration.

Bruce explains all this to Tony, excited about the findings.

“So, basically, it’s a speedball of caffeine and X, is that it?” he asks.

Bruce hems and haws and says they can’t be certain of anything like that, and that that’s a mischaracterization. These are natural body chemicals suspended in a kind of live attenuation, like plasma, not compounds put together to produce extreme effects.

(Which is not a ‘no’.)

“Is it addictive, do you think?” Tony inquires on follow-up.

Bruce shakes his head. “Impossible to tell; it’s too early. But, I will say that the rats don’t seem to be jonesing for more of it, afterward. They fall asleep and when we come back, they seem even more tired. We’ve tried setting it up to dispense on-demand as well, like their water; none have gone back for seconds.”

That’s good enough for Tony. Maybe it shouldn’t be. Actually, it _really_ shouldn't be.

But Peter deserves better, frequently. More, always.

Tony’s gonna be that for him.

***

Is he expecting Peter to walk in, home early from training with the Spider Crew (and sweaty, and holding takeout, and, and), just as Tony’s about to inject his vial of… whatever this stuff is called after it’s been titrated and filtered and distilled down into its active ingredients?

No, no he is not.

Peter’s eyes go wide and his eyebrows make a beeline for his hairline. “Uh, Tony?”

“It’s not what it looks like,” Tony says immediately, which, yes, he recognizes makes him sound guilty as hell. Peter puts the takeout on the counter and crosses his arms, eyeing the syringe.

“Oh,” Peter returns, “... so you’re not about to inject radioactive goop into your veins?”

“Well, fuck, Peter. I thought you’d think it was heroin. I don’t know what you know!”

His husband softens a little. “I know you wouldn’t go back to that, after all this time.”

Oh. _Oh._ Tony had forgotten how disarming Peter’s belief in him could be, in moments like this one, when he’s about to be monumentally stupid but not _apocalyptically_ so. “Well, then, yes. It’s exactly what it looks like.”

The softness doesn’t last. “Are you fucking kidding me? That came from my body. My _inhuman_ body. Dr. Cho sent me an alert saying there was a vial missing. She thought _a supervillain_ might have taken it.” Peter punctuates his statement by gesturing at Tony, as if to say, _that’s you._

“Wait, you thought a supervillain had your… goop, did you call it? And you still stopped for takeout?”

“It was a pickup order! I’d already placed it! I webbed it from the guy’s hands curbside. Also, this is not about me! We’re talking about _you_ being stupid.”

Tony doesn’t put the syringe away, although he can _feel_ Peter willing him to. “I’m doing this for you, kid...” he hears himself argue.

“You _are not_ ,” Peter retorts. “You are feeling old, which is valid, but you’re putting it on me and that’s so uncool, you have to know that. Don’t you think I feel old sometimes, too? I’m almost thirty!”

“Oh, no no no. You can _zip it,_  hon. You are a _baby._  Thirty is the new twenty.”

Peter rolls his eyes, which. Gotta say, Tony doesn’t think it helps his point about maturing.

Peter also takes a step forward, and he is definitely _not_ looking at Tony’s hand which holds the syringe, and Tony finds that eminently suspicious.

“Listen, Tony, _please._  I’m home now, and there’s no supervillain. Put that down and we can go in the bedroom and work out our stresses. This doesn’t have to be a fight, or- well. Rather, if we’re gonna fight, I’d rather we do it in the bedroom, the fun way.”

Tony squints at his lover. “Holy balls, you’re doing the thing!”

Peter stops dead. “What thing?”

“The thing that you do. To supervillains and villainesses. You’re, you’re… you’re _honeypotting_ me, you fuckin’ _twink,_  oh my god.”

Peter pushes his own hair back from his forehead, planting his feet in a stance that flatters his hips, and leans back. “Am I?”

“You _fucker,_  stop it, I can’t believe you!”

Peter gives it up and darts forward to take the vial by force. He’s far too fast for Tony to get away and Tony’s not used to facing down his own partner, not like this. He tightens his fist instinctively.

The vial cracks, and the pieces of glass tear tiny cuts into his palm.

He looks on, removed, as his hand opens and red drips and tinkles to the tile that makes up the floor of their breakfast bar area.

Peter has his own instincts, Tony supposes, because he doesn’t stop himself from trying to help Tony, from plucking a shard from Tony’s palm and placing it carefully on the counter before going back for more. “Wait, should I. Should I be touching it?” he suddenly says, voice a breathy, puzzled whisper.

Tony looks up and away from his injury, into Peter’s face. He’s still floating and removed, but he notices absently, that Peter’s eyes meet his and his pupils dilate.

Oh.

He guesses that means the answer is ‘no’.


End file.
